PL-900: Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals – Prep Notes
There was an ask form a Power Platform beginner in my blog about the preparation for the PL-900 exam.
As I attained the certification recently, I am going to share the topics I covered for my preparation in this article.
***This article is strictly for guidance purpose and by no means I intend to post the questions from the exam***
Areas I covered during my preparation:
- Power Platform Environments
- Types of Environments
- Use of Default Environment
- Built-in Roles – Admin Role, Maker Role
- Canvas Apps vs Model Driven Apps
- Understand that ‘Model Driven Apps’ can only consume CDS data.
- You need Canvas app for other types of data.
- Data Connectors
- Tabular data and Functional-based data connectors
- Power Automate Flow
- How you post CDS data to SAP/Saleforce/etc
- Integrate Flow with Canvas and Model Driven Apps.
- How to test the Flow.
- Power Apps Portals
- Understand the basics of Web Page, Web Role, Web Templates.
- AI Builder
- Understand what you can achieve with the 4 models.
- Power BI
- Power BI Desktop vs Power BI Service : What can and can’t be done with each.
- Data Modeling.
- How to create and share Dashboards.
If any further questions or need guidance feel free to leave a comment.
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ADX Portal – Forgot Password – ‘Invalid Party Object Type’ Error
Few of our ADX portal users encountered an unhandled exception while resetting the Password using native ‘Forgot Password’ feature.
Reason:
- Its a sporadic issue only with few portal users.
- When checked the ‘Event viewer’ logs on Portal’s web server, there was this following warning with ‘Invalid Party Object Type 9’ exception message.
- In CRM, ‘Object Type 9’ denotes OOB ‘Team’ entity and the issue turns out to be with the ‘From’ field of ‘Send Password Reset To Contact‘ ADX process.
- In our requirement, we were setting ‘From’ field of ‘Send Password Reset To Contact’ process to owner of the ‘Portal User’ (i.e.,Contact).
- Portal user’s (i.e.,Contact) who owned by teams encountering this issue while triggering ‘Forgot Password’. As Email can’t be delivered when a ‘Team’ set as ‘From’.
Fix:
- Modified the ‘Send Password Reset To Contact‘ process by setting ‘From’ field to a ‘System User’ with Mail Box enabled. This made sure no ‘Team’ renders in ‘From’ field.
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Power Apps – Minimum privileges to run app
To configure a security role with minimum privileges to run an app, a pre-packaged unmanaged solution is available in Microsoft download center and can be downloaded from hereÂ
The solution contains a security role by name ‘min prv apps use‘.
Use ‘min prv apps use‘ security role as a reference and copy to a new role and configure additional privileges as per your business needs.
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Power Apps – ‘Environment Variables’ and their usage in Canvas Apps
Lets take a scenario, where you would want to pass a 3rd party API URL to your plug-in which changes every quarter. Couple of options to pass the URL to plug-in are either pass the URL as ‘Secured/Unsecured parameters’ or Create an entity and store the API URL and fetch from plug-in using Query Expression.
Using ‘Environment variables’, which is Power Apps preview feature currently, we can configure the input parameters allow management of data separately compared to hard-coding values.
Up on creating ‘Environment variable’, a new record gets added to both OOB ‘Environment Variable Definition’ entity and ‘Environment Variable Values’ entities.
‘Environment Variable Values’ is child to the ‘Environment Variable Definition’ entity.
We can refer records from these OOB entities in plug-ins or Canvas Apps or Power Automate just like any other entities.
In this article, lets see how to create ‘Environment Variables’ and use them in Canvas App.
Prerequisites:
- Subscribe to 30 days trial and get Office 365 account.
- Connect to Power Apps maker portal using Office 365 account.
Create a new ‘Environment variable’:
- From Power Apps maker portal go to ‘Solutions’ tab.
- Either create a new solution/Open Existing solution.
- From ribbon, click on New -> Environment variable
- In the ‘New environment variable’ pane, provide ‘Display Name’ and choose ‘Data Type’.
- Provide either ‘Default Value’ or ‘Current Value’
- Save. I’ve created a ‘Text’ variable with an environment URL as ‘Current Value’.
- I’ve configured a Model driven app with ‘Environment Variable Definition’ entity added to the ‘Site Map’ to check the created ‘Environment variable’ record.
- Open the Model driven app and go to ‘Environment Variable Definition’ and you will see the record.
Using ‘Environment variable’ in Canvas app:
As the ‘Environment variable’ stores in ‘Environment Variable Definition’ and ‘Environment Variable Values’ entities, we can add these entities from ‘Data sources’.
- Create a new Canvas App.
- Add ‘Environment Variable Definitions’ and ‘Environment Variable Values’ entities as Data sources.
- Add a Label to display the ‘Environment variable’ value.
- Use ‘LookUp’ function to get the specific ‘Environment variable’ filtered by ‘Display Name’.
- LookUp(‘Environment Variable Values’,’Environment Variable Definition’.’Display Name’=”AppURL”).Value
- In the above formula, ‘AppURL’ is my ‘Environment Variable’ display name.
- The value would be fetched and set to the Label text.
Managing ‘Environment variables’:
- Environment variables can be created and managed through the modern solution interface or by using code.
- A separate JSON file is created within your solution package for the values, which can also be managed in source control and modified in a build pipeline.
- When you export the solution, a json file ‘environment_variable_values’ will be available.
- Open the file and the ‘Environment Variables’ render as json records.
- Export to and import from Excel is also supported.
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ADX Portal – Display ‘Message’ during maintenance window
There might be times when your Portal is under scheduled maintenance or is down due to temporary outage. When a user accesses the portal during maintenance, unpredictable behavior and intermittent unavailability might be experienced.
In ADX portal we can display a message to users during a maintenance activity by following below steps:
- Create a HTML page with the message you would want to display.
- Save it as ‘App_Offline.htm‘.
- Make sure the name of the file is exactly same.
- Place this file in root folder of ADX website.
- ADX always opens ‘App_Offline.htm’ page, if it finds in root folder.
- Hit the portal URL and you would get the ‘App_Offline.htm’ page, which displays your maintenance message.
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PowerApps Portal – Enable Maintenance mode
During a scheduled maintenance or due to a temporary outage, If you want to bring down your portal and display a proper message to users, PowerApps portal has “Enable Maintenance mode” option.
In this article lets see how to use ‘Enable Maintenance mode’ option.
Prerequisites:
- Subscribe to 30 days trial and procure an Office 365 account.
Steps to navigate to Portals admin center:
- Connect to Power Apps maker portal using Office 365 account.
- Create a new PowerApps portal app, if you don’t have already.
- Now from the ‘Apps’ tab, select your portal and go to ‘Settings’.
- From the ‘Portal settings’ pane, click on ‘Administration’ link.
- You will be redirected to ‘PowerApps Portals admin center’.
Enable/disable Maintenance mode:
- Select ‘Portal Actions’ tab and click on ‘Enable maintenance mode’
- You get the ‘Enable maintenance mode’ popup.
- Under Select page to be used when maintenance mode is enabled: Select one of the following values:
- Default page: Select this value if you want the default page to be displayed. By default, this option is selected.
- Custom page: Select this value if you want a custom HTML page to be displayed.
- Custom page URL: You must ensure that the page URL you provide is publicly accessible.Â
- I opted ‘Default page’ option and clicked on ‘Enable’.
- If you browse the portal, you would get following screen:
Notes:
- When the maintenance mode is enabled, the customers are restricted from browsing any webpages except the
<portal URL>/_services/aboutpage. - If you opt for ‘Custom page’ option, make sure, the custom page you provided should not contain the
x-frame-options:SAMEORIGINresponse header, else the page will not load.
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Power Platform – Pass external API collection from Power Automate to Canvas App
In this article, lets see how to pass an external API’s json collection from Power Automate(Formerly ‘Microsoft Flow’) to a Canvas application.
For this example, I am going to use ESRIÂ mapping service API, in my Power Automate Flow. Refer here to know more about ESRI. You may also use other APIs as per your convenience.
ESRI API is url based and returns the ‘Address Suggestions’ in json format.
Before we start lets make sure to meet all the prerequisites.
Prerequisites:
- Subscribe to 30 days trial and get Office 365 account.
- Connect to Power Automate portal using Office 365 account to build Power Automate flow.
- Connect to Power Apps maker portal using Office 365 account to build the Canvas App.
- ESRI api URL – Refer my previous article on the usage of ESRI or you can simply use this url
Once all prerequisites are met, here is the high level design:
- Create a new Power Automate flow and call ESRI API to fetch Address Suggestions.
- You can take any open API which returns json collection.
- Parse the ESRI API Response to json collection.
- Create a new Canvas app
- Trigger Power automate flow from Canvas App and read the collection.
Lets get started.
Steps to configure the Power Automate Flow:
- Connect to Power Automate portal
- Create a new ‘Instant flow’ by selecting the right Environment.
- Provide a name ‘GetAddressSuggestions’ and select trigger as ‘PowerApps’
- To call ESRI api, add a new ‘HTTP’ action.
- Choose Method as ‘GET’ and in URI paste the ESRI url as mentioned in prerequisite section.
- Next, we need to parse the response from ESRI api. As the ESRI results would be in json format, add ‘Parse JSON’ action.
- In ‘Parse JSON’ action,
- set Content as ‘Body’ from HTTP action.
- Next we need to provide the json schema of ESRI response. To do that, click on ‘Generate from sample’.
- Now copy the response from ESRI API (Copy the browser’s output using ctrl+a+copy)
- Paste in the ‘Insert a sample JSON Payload’ window and click ‘Done’.
- If no warnings, your ‘Parse JSON’ pane should look as below.
- As we completed the ESRI response capture and parsing to json, now we need to pass the captured json response to Power App.
- To pass the json response to Power App, add a new ‘Response’ action.
- In the ‘Response’ pane,
- Set the ‘Body’ to ‘Body’ from ‘Parse JSON’.
- Expand ‘Show advanced options’ and click on ‘Generate from sample’.
- Copy the response from ESRI API and paste in the ‘Insert a sample JSON Payload’ window and click ‘Done’. (Same step like we did in ‘Parse JSON’ pane).
- ‘Response’ pane should look as below with no warnings.
- Run the flow and make sure it ran successfully.
Steps to configure the Canvas App:
As we completed the Power Auto Flow, now its time to consume the Power Automate flow response from Canvas App by following the steps below
- Connect to Power Apps maker portal using the same Office 365 account.
- Create a new Canvas App.
- Note: Make sure the same Environment used for Power Automate is selected.
- Add a new button.
- Select the button, from the ribbon menu, click on ‘Action -> Power Automate’.
- From the pane select the ‘GetAddressSuggestions’ Power app flow.
- After few seconds, you would see the Run() command auto populated as below.
- As we going to get json collection from flow, lets capture the json collection to a collection variable ‘collAddress’ using ‘ClearCollect()’. Refer article to know more about ‘ClearCollect()’.
- With the ClearCollect() and Run() functions, the final ‘OnSelect’ statement should look as below.
- Lets run the App and click on the button. Application takes couple of minutes to complete the run.
- Post run, check the collection returned from flow by going to ‘File -> Collections’ tab.
- You can also add a ‘Data table’ control and display the results returned from flow as below
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